The present invention relates, generally, to the field of system component reliability and, more specifically, to methods for addressing system component time-in-service reliability concerns.
The modern automobile customer expects an automotive product that meets or exceeds high reliability standards throughout the product's life-span at a cost that represents value. A customer's long term experience with an automotive product will, over time, influence customer satisfaction, reliability reputation, customer loyalty and thus, product resale values and repeat product sales. For automobile manufacturers, the monitoring of extended time-in-service performance (typically measured in mileage) of an automotive system component and the ability to address reliability concerns early in a product lifecycle may be of further economic advantage by contributing to reductions in warranty expenses. Therefore, automobile manufacturers have long sought to monitor extended time-in-service or “high mileage” system component performance in order to improve the reliability of automotive systems. As such, various methods have been developed to identify system component reliability concerns and to understand their causes. After the analysis of reliability concerns, system component performance criteria can be established to better address long term concerns and give engineers performance benchmarks for the development of corrective design solutions. One drawback of this approach is that the time necessary to compile high mileage reliability data makes tailoring corrective design solutions to empirical data impractical.
U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2002/0078403 discloses a reliability assessment program for compiling and analyzing failure rate data for an automotive or aircraft system component that is unrelated to a corrective design process. The similarity analysis method compares the degree of similarity between an in-service system component and a newly designed system component to determine a failure cause model for predicting the failure rate of the new design. While this invention is useful for its intended purposes, it predicts the failure rate of a newly designed system component, which may or may not be related to the previous in-service system component, only after the new design is completed. Therefore, the invention is not intended as a process for designing a new system component based on the reliability concerns of the previous in-service system component.
As such, it is desirable to have a method of identifying and addressing time-in-service reliability concerns for components that constitute complex systems such as automotive or aircraft systems. In particular, there is a need in the art for a method that addresses time-in-service concerns for system components exhibiting constant and increasing reliability concern rates over a long range time-in-service period. Constant and increasing reliability concern rates have been shown to negatively influence long term customer satisfaction and thus, brand quality perception. There is a need in the art for a method for establishing the reliability of a system component exhibiting constant or increasing reliability concern rates in a reasonable amount of time so the results of such a method may influence corrective design considerations. There is also a need in the art for a method of determining a corrective design for a system component based on the established benchmark performance of a “best-in-class” system component, defined as a system component exhibiting the lowest reliability concern rates in comparison to comparable system components for a particular application. Finally, there is a need in the art for a method for predicting the improvement in reliability of a corrective system component design over that of a previous system component design before the corrective system component goes into service.